Criticism is the first step towards success

Criticism is the first step towards success

Accepting criticism is not for everybody, finding the source of that same criticism and attacking it is an even more difficult task, but that is what will make you grow.

Even though there is no defined latter for climbing towards success; asking, receiving and acting on a feed-back is a proven tool for maximizing engagement and company growth, as said by Christine Comaford, senior contributor with Forbes and consultor on neuroscience.

It’s not always about being told that you are wrong, having a feedback can immediately be proof of your product or service reaching the right customers or response. It becomes an opportunity to learn to see what you’re not achieving, in other words, it’s the quickest, most easiest way to look at your duties by an informal-external advisor. The answer or the way you respond to those same feed-backs determines the maturity and resilience of you and your business, and you have to remember that sometimes it can or cannot be personal, but the key of many industry leaders around the world is picking up the facts and re-building to make it work in your advantage.

According to Thomas Koulopoulos, founder of Delphi Group, hunger cannot be faked, you’re either hungry or not, and accepting criticism is understanding your business has awoken a strange curiosity in the person that has feed-back for your work.

Constructive criticism is useful because it draws the route to good practice and the analysis of the way you are handling your work. If you can get someone to personally tell what they want from your service or product, your one step ahead of your competition, so it’s a very important thing to always say thank you to a piece of feed-back and see how you can make the best of it. Neither is it about accepting the feed-back and applying it every time into your planning and strategy, but we must be aware that even though a complement feels very good, it’s the criticism that helps build for future.

Of course, accepting criticism is a matter of experience and maturity, and one thing that can help develop that ability is identifying in a personal level what you desire versus what you should desire, this way taking criticism can result into a useful experience. In his 2004 report “Multifaceted Nature of Intrinsic Motivation: The theory of 16 basic desires”, Steven Reiss from The Ohio State University, shares the 16 types of desires that reign in the human mentality. Be sure to identify yours and work on your ability to listen, learn and execute from criticism and feed-back.

As for Kevin Kruse, founder and CEO of LEADx.org, he suggests being mindful, taking your time to choose evaluation, and practice active listening, and even though it feels like a ding in our self-worth and ego, know it’s not. Kruse writes a very useful piece of experience in his Forbes entry of august 12th, 2014:

I once had a business partner who automatically asked, “Thanks but tell me just one thing you think I could do better” every time someone gave him a compliment. He knew that while positive feedback feels good, it’s the constructive criticism that can be invaluable. -.